It might pay to be resilient, if this was all being vulnerable and skinless got you. People didn’t stop and cluck over damage done unless you made it worth their while. Indeed, maybe it was time to rethink this whole salvation business. Or maybe I was less desperate, less teetering on the edge than I cared to admit. Now, that was a refreshing possibility.

No bill of sexual rights can hold its own against the lawless, untamable landscape of the erotic imagination.

There's something stubborn about families, unhappy ones in particular: they outlive themselves, and then they live on.

My mother is the source of my unease in the world and thus the only person who can make me feel at home in the world.

How much simpler it would be all around if you could put your mind in a cast, like a broken ankle, and elicit murmurings of sympathy from other people instead of skepticism (“You can’t really be feeling as bad as all that”) and in some cases outright hostility (“Maybe if you stopped thinking about yourself so much ”).

I see depression as an exponentially developed version of a human condition. Meaning I always think in the end it's humanizing. People who never suffer from depression I find suspect. I assume Donald Trump is not a sufferer from depression.

Naturally, our own irrational demands strike us as having the force of needs, while other people's needs strike us as capricious indulgences.